Crabapple Blossoms
by Syrinx
Summary: This is not Cindy Blake's life. Cindy, pre-series.


Crabapple Blossoms  
By Syrinx  
Summary: This is not Cindy Blake's life.  
Disclaimer: All rights to the Thoroughbred series belong to Joanna Campbell and Harper Collins.  
A/N: Pre-series.

Outside the window of the old, two story brick home stood a crabapple tree. It was ancient, with faintly peeling bark and tiny holes drilled in the trunk that looked so tiny and precise that they could have been made by machines. The branches were brittle and stretching, scraping against the sides of the house and the windows during the storms and wind. It always woke her up at night when the tips of the tree would drag slightly to and fro across the surface of the clear panes.

It wasn't a spectacular tree. In fact, it was ugly most of the year. The leaves where small and dark green and the fruit it produced were small and useless. The only thing that it did was attract insects to buzz around the rotting crabapples that fell to the ground. Every so often someone would step on a bee and come away stung and crying. It had never happened to her.

However, during the spring this was all different. She would wake up in her bed and look up out of her north-facing window to stare at the pink blossoms that would dance in the breeze to greet her good morning. The whole tree would be in bloom, and during those few weeks it was the happiest time of her life. She would climb up into the branches and smile down at the other children looking up at her because she was fearless and wouldn't care if she fell. She would pick the smaller blossoms off the branches to slip behind her ear and pretend she was somewhere else. She was a princess maybe, or a fairy who lived in trees like this that never stopped blooming.

These were fantasies, and she only allowed them when the tree was in bloom. In truth, she had nothing. She shared a room with two other girls in the same position as herself, and she took what was given to her and knew it was only temporary. Everything in her life was temporary, but she had known no other life so to have nothing seemed normal. The girls she lived with, both orphaned too late to escape this fate, were not her friends and the adults she lived with treated her like a means of welfare. This was not a family, and the older she got the more she began to understand that this was not the place for her.

"Cynthia Blake, would you get out of that tree and inside? It's time for dinner," she heard her foster mother, Trisha, calling up from the ground. Cindy looked down at the woman through the branches and the blossoms.

"I'm not hungry," Cindy said simply, gripping harder to the tree for support.

"You are going to eat," Trisha demanded. "Now get down."

"No," Cindy shook her head, and in the process the blossom she had placed behind her ear twisted loose and fell to the ground to lie among the grass and the violets.

"Cindy," Trisha sighed. "I don't want to get John out here."

Cindy narrowed her eyes at Trisha's veiled threat. John was her foster father, who had little impatience with her and less for the other girls. Cindy had somehow managed to stay on his good side through the two years she had been in their house, although she was never quite sure why. She had never been on many foster parents' good sides. Her last house she had been expelled from and deemed a problem child since she had tried unsuccessfully to mount up on one of their horses without supervision. Cindy found this funny, since she had done it successfully without supervision many other times. It was just the one failure that she had been caught in the act.

"Fine," Cindy huffed, swinging off her branch and climbing nimbly down to the ground. Trisha was waiting for her, arms crossed and eyebrow raised.

"Good," Trisha nodded, taking Cindy's arm and leading her back to the house. "Now go take your place at the table. We've all been waiting."

When Cindy stepped into the door she braced herself and looked at the three figures sitting at the table staring at her. John, heavy set and in his late thirties, turned his frightening light blue eyes on her as she scurried across the living room and into the dining room, sitting in her chair next to Denise and Lisa, who looked at her quietly without expression.

"Now we can start," Trisha sighed, sitting down across from John and beginning to pass around the food. Cindy passed with the rest, taking what she wanted. She had little pieces of everything, and hardly ate what she had placed on the plate to begin with.

"Eat more, Cynthia," John told her, motioning to the mashed potatoes next to her. Cindy obediently placed more on her plate and played with them with her fork.

The table was silent, as it was always silent. Denise, Lisa and Cindy ate with their eyes downcast, rarely looking at each other. It was understandable, Cindy supposed. Lisa had a small cut on her eyebrow that had been recently bandaged, and Cindy couldn't bear to look at it. Denise, the oldest of the three and a teenager, hardly cared to speak to the younger girls and gave John contemptuous looks. Cindy tried not to notice any of these things, but she always wound up seeing them. Lisa had provoked her foster father a few days ago, and wound up being pushed out the front door, where she tripped and scraped herself up against the cement steps. That had been the first time Cindy had witnessed anything quite like that, and it had made her retreat to the crabapple tree for longer than usual. With Denise, Cindy knew far less. She was the eldest and the most secretive, saying hardly anything to Cindy and the even younger Lisa. There was something about her that Cindy was glad to not know.

After dinner, Cindy helped Denise pick up the table. It was their night to clean. Denise washed and Cindy dried, standing side by side in the quiet kitchen. In the rest of the house, Lisa was curled up on a sofa with a book and Trisha was nowhere to be seen. John was sitting in the recliner, drinking a beer and propping his foot up on the coffee table while watching a boxing match on tv. Cindy ducked her head as Denise handed her the last dish and flicked the soapy water off her hands.

"Here," Cindy said, handing the older girl a clean rag. Denise took it without a word.

That night, Cindy heard the quiet sounds of weeping. She opened her eyes and looked across the room. Lisa was asleep, but Denise was sitting on her bed, staring out the window at the tree scraping lightly across the glass.

"Denise?" Cindy asked, pushing the covers slowly down and getting out of bed, walking across the room to the other girl's bed. Denise didn't answer her, but Cindy looked down at the girl's hands and saw one slim bloody finger.

"Denise?" Cindy asked with more of a panicked voice. "What is that?"

"Don't," Denise snapped, jumping up as Cindy moved to touch her hand. "Don't, Cindy."

Denise slipped by her before she could react, swiping at her eyes with her clean hand and disappearing in the bathroom. Cindy sat stunned on the bed, listening to the water running in the bathroom, the rumble of a distant storm approaching, and the tiny reassuring scrape of the crabapple tree against the windowpane.

The next morning Denise was gone. The bed was a wreck, the sheets spilling onto the floor, and the most important of her belongings were gone off the shelves. Cindy sat on her bed in her pajamas, her knees brought up to her chest as she stared at the empty space where Denise had been. Her mind was a blank, but she could tell she was slightly rocking.

"Jesus Christ almighty," Trisha whispered, standing in the open doorway.

"Where the hell is she?" she heard John louder in the hall.

"How the hell should I know where she is?" Trisha asked back, angry.

"She could be anywhere by now," John grated out. "We're calling the agency."

"I'll call the police," Trisha said, calming down.

Cindy darted a look over at Lisa, who also sat in her bed, her bare legs hanging off the side and almost brushing the floor. The younger girl gave Cindy a long, tender look. Cindy took a deep breath.

Denise had not been found. Cindy sat in the crabapple tree, staring at the dying blossoms, crying and touching her face. There was no bruise, but it felt like one was forming. She leaned against the trunk of the tree, staring at the neighborhood around her. There were houses on all sides, with fenced in yards and dogs hooked up to running lines or being walked down the street. Cindy held her hand to her cheek, feeling the throbbing as the wind picked up and tangled in her thick, unkempt hair. She opened her mouth a little, wetting her chapped lips. She stared beyond the houses, beyond the residential development to the city of Lexington behind it.

It almost frightened her, all the places she hadn't seen. She had read books about them, of course, and dreamed of going there while she sat in this tree staring at the blossoms. She looked inside the windows of the house she stayed at and at the windows of the houses nearby, wondering how real families behaved. She found herself knowing that this was not all life had to offer. There had to be more that she was not getting. She was being cheated, but she was stuck.

Cindy plucked off a blossom, looking at it and putting it behind her ear. No, she had decided. Quietly, she climbed down from the tree and looked west.

In the night she kissed Lisa's forehead while the girl slept, creeping the brief note she had written into the book the girl was reading. Then she slung the crammed backpack over her shoulders and opened the window, the crabapple tree tapping against the pane and getting caught in her hair as she climbed out and jumped down, landing softly in the grass. She took one brief moment to look up, seeing the curtains blowing in the light wind.

Cindy smiled for a brief second, and turned to walk underneath the crabapple tree, reaching up as she went to grab another blossom off the branches. She didn't look behind her and began to walk away, twirling the blossom reassuringly in her fingers.


End file.
